The Passing of Poetry Monday’s Editor Irene Willis

Editor’s Note: Irene Willis, author of our Poetry Monday column for many years, died Jan. 3 of natural causes in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She was 96.

She will be greatly missed and leaves us with many fond memories. Irene had been editing her latest book, Before We Had Pockets: Uncollected Poems and Essays, which IP Books plans to publish posthumously. Here is a selection from that book, as her final contribution to Poetry Monday:

Time’s A-Wastin’

All the names I know 
All the ones I’ve met – 
Could any ever serve 
As harbingers of regret?
Or the unblemished sense
of time without end 
before it rushed on without me?

Click Here to Read All Poetry Monday posts on this website,

Click Here to Purchase: And Another Thing: poems by Irene Willis

Click Here to Purchase: Allow Me: New and Selected Poems: 1975 to 2021 by Irene Willis

Click Here to Purchase: Green Dialogue: poems by Irene Willis

Click Here to Purchase: What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration edited by Irene Willis and Jim Haba,

Click Here to Purchase: Rehearsal: Poems by Irene Willis

Click Here to Purchase: Climate of Opinion: Sigmund Freud in Poetry Edited and With an Introduction by Irene Willis.

Kiran Desai on the gift of loneliness

Click Here to View: VERBATIM: Kiran Desai on the gift of loneliness: The author of “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” on the curse and blessing of being alone, her 20-year road to making a masterpiece, and how her Indian uncles tell her to use ChatGPT on her writing by Anand Giridharadas, Kiran Desai, and Leigh Haber on the Ink Substack on December 24, 2025.

Preview

New from IPBooks: When Dreams Remember by Jacqueline Heller

Click Here to Order:  When Dreams Remember by Jacqueline Heller on IPBooks.net

WHEN DREAMS REMEMBER

Adopted in infancy, Hannah Glass’s childhood on Long Island was idyllic. Panic began taking hold of her when, at age 14, she witnessed on television the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Later, as a young woman, she watched as her fiancé, David, was struck and killed by a bus on a Manhattan street. Only in the aftermath of her grief did Hannah begin to think about  her origins. Now an accomplished journalist, Hannah decides to investigate her past and learn about her birth mother.

Serendipitously, Hannah receives a plum assignment from a national magazine to interview trauma expert Dr. Jo Brightman. More than a celebrity profile, Hannah sees the gig as an opportunity to understand her lifelong struggles with terror. Could the emotional effects of ancestral, social, and cultural trauma be inherited?

But before she can complete the article, Hannah receives word from a long-lost relative in England, Zachary Levi, via his close associate, Mr. Graham Pauly, that she is Levi’s sole heir and beneficiary. More of the answers Hannah seeks lie in the contents of a mysterious vintage chest shipped by Levi to Hannah’s parents’ home. Still more is revealed when she travels to London to meet Zach and Graham, as the journey morphs from one of investigating the past to exploring love.